From Hybridity to Networked Relationality: Actors, Ideologies and the Legacies of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement

Abstract

This article reflects on hybrid relationality as an analytical lens for peacebuilding. It narrates the evolution of 'the hybrid turn' and engages with common critiques of hybridity. It notes an additional critique of hybridity's implicit normativity. This article agrees that relational approaches have much to offer hybrid peacebuilding analysis and argues they could be strengthened with complementation from a networked lens. The proposed networked relational framework is animated with examples from Sudanese peacebuilding following the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. Overall, the article builds on critiques of hybridity and offers a networked approach as a supplement to new relational frameworks.

Why Did State-Building Policy Fail in Afghanistan?

“…Hybridity scholars' contributions broadened perspectives on state-building processes by questioning state-building Weberian model viability, contrasting the new emphasis on interactions over previous binary assumptions of international/local, Western/non-Western, liberal/non-liberal or modern/traditional. However, the rise hybrid studies in last decade and their efforts to demonstrate that local ownership is highly agential, stratified and diverse (Kapleer, 2014 cited by Wilcock, 2021), also failed to rid itself of a critical current that was called into question hybridization value to adequately describe international interventions effects in local contexts and explain their uneven results, because, basically, it tends to substitute some binaries for others (Hameiri & Jones, 2017: pp. 55-56) since concept' essence, in short, it starts from recognition of two opposing and related forces (Heathershaw.…”

“…2013: p. 277), each thought of (international-liberal and local-traditional) as ideal types that fail to explain complex diversity of interests and contradictions that manifest themselves within them (Hirblinger & Simons, 2015: p. 424). Thus, in recent years, studies have appeared that propose to go beyond hybridization and analyze interactions between international intervention and local agency as a scales politics, in which power and resources are inevitably reallocated to different levels, which are not neutral and have their own agendas and interests (Hameiri & Jones, 2017); or that they use networking as a complementary concept to hybridization for determine specific location of social actors and their circulation patterns within wider interactions networks (Hunt, 2018;Wilcock, 2021).…”